This clear, carefully constructed study examines the attitudes of European intellectuals toward religious America over the century and a half extending loosely from Waterloo through World War II. The narrative explores “images and explanations of religion in American history . . . as conceived and articulated by prominent European intellectuals, travelers, and writers” (1). At first sight, this seems a thankless chore, culling the main ingredients from a stew of denigration and disdain, steeped in arrogance, well sprinkled with ignorance, and served up with dreary predictability by the full herd of Europe's most celebrated—and purportedly independent—minds. For the American reader, it is a theme made to annoy. Howard wisely opts for patience over repugnance, however, and brings real insight to his inquiry; his analyses manage to inform and illuminate throughout.

European distaste for America's freewheeling religious pluralism, egalitarianism, and voluntarism achieved a true coincidence of opposites. Disparagement came with equal intensity from both the traditionalist Right—Europe's post-revolutionary advocates of Restoration, Romanticism, and old-order Catholicism—and the progressive Left: the voices of radical change who preached the several gospels of liberalism, socialism, and Communism. The major spokesmen for Restoration conservatism, from Bonald, Chateaubriand, and Prince Metternich on the continent to Edmund Burke and other old-regime Tories in England, found the unguided American religious free-for-all to be incomprehensible. They were joined readily in their disillusionment by a large floating raft of (mostly British) transatlantic travelers and literati, from Fanny Trollope, Dickens, and Carlyle to Matthew Arnold, Ruskin, and the Tory novelist Frederick Marryat—disdainers all. Commentaries by continentals included the jaundiced travelogue of Austrian poet Nikolaus Lenau and its fictional reprise by countryman Ferdinand Kürnberger, whose novel Der Amerikamüde heaped scorn on American vulgarity; the latter's book skewed the judgments even of the incomparable patriarch of sociology, Max Weber, who certainly should have known better. To his credit, Weber at least made distinctions. Others saw little need to bother. New-world religion for them betrayed the general American propensity for social leveling of the most unappealing sort; it opened the door on a “ranting and raving tumult,” as the British consul in Boston put it: a chaotic spectacle of Philistine ignorance, egalitarian nonsense, and appalling vulgarity where enthusiasts brought “disgrace and shame on the name of the very Religion they desecrate” (37). It made little difference to most of Europe's cultured despisers whether they had actually seen any of the America they so heartily disliked. Why leave the comforts of the Heimat when insult can pass for inquiry? Thus did German mandarins like Heine and Schlegel, Schopenhauer, Treitschke, and a line of others up to the present-day academy's most favored Nazi, Martin Heidegger, tow the same dyspeptically anti-American line. For some, amusingly, ignorance of American culture was exceeded only by ignorance of their own. Of the fastidious Austrian Kürnberger, so revolted by American vulgarity, we want to ask: had he ever heard the yodelers of the Tyrol? Could he guess his native tongue would give the term kitsch to the languages of the world?

The habit of reflexive denigration in ignorance turned Europe's self-anointed agents of the avant garde into curious bedfellows with the most reactionary, dogmatic Catholicism of the age. In works like Louis Veuillot's L'Univers and Edmund Jorg's History of Protestantism, in papal documents like Longinqua Oceani and Testem Benevolentiae, and in the bromides of Jesuits Camilo Mazzela and Salavatore Brandi, denouncing their Protestant neighbors from their fortress-Rome-in-isolation at Woodstock Seminary in Maryland, the voices of Catholic dogmatic orthodoxy furnished a virtual Greek chorus of mournful comment on America's foolish religious ways: its sins of egalitarianism, sectarianism, and bourgeois individualism, all laden with the great iniquity that had come of separating Church from State. Denigration by the Left was just as forcible and almost equally monolithic, though the complaints were predictably opposite in character. For Europe's socialists and radical republicans, it was not the bubbling sectarian religiosity that rankled; the deepest offense lay in the fact that religion survived at all, whatever its muddled and boisterous forms. For social theorists in the vein of St. Simon, Proudhon, Comte, and (later on) Emile Durkheim, America was truly the land gone backward in time, the recidivist home of tribal superstition persisting into modernity. Just when the finger of history was writing secularization on the wall, Americans showed the Hebrew audacity of Daniel reading the script—only backward. The harder Left could not have agreed more. Their Doctorvater Hegel thought the United States a strangely childish society, while Marx and others in the lineage of the Hegelian left-wing found it a veritable ocean of false consciousness: its religious vigor and variety served only to bolster the capitalist ways of a people who had perversely melded peasant religion with bourgeois exploitation. For Engels the excessive religiosity betrayed “a certain backwardness of thought” (85), while Kautsky was more blunt, finding America overrun with “demagogues and fools” (114). Refugees to the revolutionary nation of 1776 from the revolts of 1848 showed similar contempt; for them the new land was far too steeped in Biblicism and the Puritan ethic to join the war of free-thought against retrograde superstition.

In looking for some silver to line this cloud of denigration, Howard turns up two admirable exceptions: Swiss-born, German-educated church historian Philip Schaff in the nineteenth century and, in the century following, French Catholic philosopher and political theorist Jacques Maritain. To read their stories is to know immediately why Schaff and Maritain were different. Unlike their place-bound peers, pontificating in ignorance and reveling in caricature, both were true émigrés—men of the mind who did not just visit the United States but made it their home, coming gradually over time to appreciate the genius of its civil compact: the masterstroke of the First Amendment, the marvels of voluntarism and individualism, and the vitality that a truly egalitarian social order generated in the religious life of its congregations, synagogues, and parishes. The chapters tracing the parallel intellectual journeys of these two truly transatlantic thinkers from early misgivings to an embrace of the American experiment are both astute and engaging. Next to Schaff and Maritain, their egregious old-world counterparts offer a sorry group portrait of Dorian Gray: maliciously ugly when they are not pretentiously smug and ill-informed, narrowly judgmental, repulsively elitist, and utterly provincial. The most emblematic expression of these narrow minds, as revealing as it is repellent, comes to us courtesy of that model of literary refinement, the poet Heinrich Heine, for whom America was a “God accursed land,” a “monstrous prison of freedom . . . where the most repulsive of all tyrants, the masses, practice their vulgar domination” (53). Howard wisely ignores such vituperation, centering instead on the revisionist implications of his survey. He argues that religious America, so far from being a cultural backwater, a retrograde exception to the paradigm of inevitable secularization so favored by intellectual historians of the modern West, is better seen as anchoring the case for its refutation. His point is well made, but perhaps a bit too modestly. For the evidence assembled here prompts us to see in Europe's modern intellectuals a pattern of thought that goes beyond mere distaste for “the people's religion.” It runs near to a deep disaffection for the people themselves. In 1789 Europe may have overthrown its aristocracy of the blood, but the texts Howard assembles show that the idea of aristocracy was much harder to dislodge. Between 1798 and 1945 the idea that an elite must rule appears to have not so much died as undergone a subtle reincarnation, with the learned savant claiming the place once held by the titled prince. Across Europe, companies of intellectuals sought steadily to claim status as the new ruling caste. The men of the book (rather than of birth) placed themselves atop the social order as the new Brahmins, twice-born tutors to the Kshatriyas, instructing the political class on how and where to lead. In time, that new order inflicted on Europe something more horrific than anything the Ancien Régime could ever have devised: the great ideological inferno of warfare, holocaust, and massacre that consumed millions in the first half of the twentieth century. European intellectuals played a key role in those horrors, readily subordinating the lives and rights of the ordinary masses to the great ideologies of nation, race, and class. From the carnage inflicted in major part by these men of ideas, sophisticated Europe was twice delivered only when (of all places!) America—vulgar America, Heine's God-accursed homeland of the despised masses—came to its rescue. Considered in that context, there is a kind of double value in Howard's discussion—to be found not just in the main theme it explores, but in the subtext of uncomfortable further questions that his sources push us to consider: why was an actual, living democracy so deeply alien to European intellectuals of almost every type and temperament? Or, less politely put: can the continent whose intellectuals bequeathed to the West the three great authoritarian regimes of Catholicism, Communism, and Fascism really claim cultural superiority to the one whose shiploads of planes and tanks manufactured in bourgeois capitalist factories and manned by modestly educated Protestant farm boys from the midwestern plains ultimately rescued it from utter self-immolation? At the risk of being called vulgar, one is inclined to think not.